Had Robert Burns lived today, he might have said that even the best-made files sometimes go awry. (He would have, if he were a Macintosh user, surely.) We have two new Resolution paths that explain just what to do when those files do go awry.

The first Respath talks about when Fusion reports a file is missing. The best approach is making sure the files are really missing and not just moved or otherwise inaccessible, checking file permissions, and then making sure Fusion really does need those files. This Respath hopes that the files aren’t really missing, because of course we can’t help with that. However, we can always help with backup strategies…

The second Respath talks about when Fusion doesn’t want to work with a file. As before, we talk about file permissions and make sure Fusion needs those files and doesn’t have other corrupt files, but we also talk about virtual disk repair, physical disk space, the Mac OS file system, and even physical RAM.

Today we have a post about the vSphere PowerCLI from Arun Pandey, who is a Tech Support Engineer in our Bangalore, India office. Arun is currently focusing on Knowledgebase content creation. This post provides you with an overview of the PowerCLI and how you can benefit from it by automating tasks.

I have started writing this blog with introduction to ESXi because there is no Console Operating System (COS) provided in ESXi, and Administrators who are used to the COS might find transitioning to ESXi difficult.

In December 2007, the first version of ESXi was released, with no service console, reducing the size of ESXi to under 32MB. The ESXi server is able to boot off an embedded USB key so you can completely forget about issues with local storage (faulty disk, raid controller & updating firmware). With the Service Console gone ESXi improves both reliability and security.

I am impressed with all these advantages but the biggest question is about managing your ESXi host. With the service console gone, how would I perform the administrative tasks for vSphere components?

After researching for about a week, I found that vSphere PowerCLI could be used to perform all the administrative tasks. Now I can not only perform regular tasks but I can also automate them. With PowerCLI to automate tasks, you don’t have to be a Developer/Programmer anymore, you don’t have to spend time writing the if..else, do…while loops, assign variables, to get work done because PowerCLI is distributed as a Windows PowerShell snapin, and includes more than 200 PowerShell Cmdlets (commands). It becomes much simpler to use these cmdlets (the Get-<Command> to gather information, and Set-<Command>) to configure vSphere components.

Installing PowerCLI is as easy as pie, download the binary and install it and you are all set to use the PowerCLI.

There are few prerequisites to getting all the peices working(Installing .Net Framework and Power Shell 1.0/2.0), for more information see our vSphere PowerCLI Installation Guide.

Working with virtual machine snapshots (Get-VM & New-Snapshot can take snapshots for all the Virtual Machines in the Cluster/Datacenter)

Updating VMware Tools (Get-VM & Update-Tools can upgrade the Virtual Machine tools on all the Virtual Machines in the Cluster/Datacenter/Resource Pool)

Earlier, when I had to patch all my Windows Virtual Machines in my inventory, I had to manually take snapshots for them, a daunting task (i.e. taking snapshots on 100+ VM’s individually) but now, all I have to do is run:

Get-Cluster "vCloud" | Get-VM | New-Snapshot -Name Automate

from vSphereCLI and enjoy my coffee. Snapshots are created for all the Virtual Machines automatically. After installing the Windows patch I was installing I used the same trick to delete snapshots:

Amazing!! It reminds me about the Industrial Revolution when machines replaced manual labor. Today, GUIs are supplemented with CLIs, and with the amount of time that I saved, I’m planning to continue to explore our CLI.

Now I no longer fear how I can manage my ESXi servers without a service console, and I strongly recommend learning the vSphere PowerCLI to you.

Nathan Small, a staff Engineer here at VMware wrote this article initially to help storage and non-storage Tech Support Engineers understand how our storage stack works with real world examples. You can bet that if this information is useful for TSEs working the phones, then it’s useful to you as well.

This article details what you might see during a VMware ESX 4.x storage multipathing failover sequence, as it is logged in /var/log/vmkernel.

If you attended this year’s VMworld event in San Francisco you received an entrance badge similar to mine, shown here. If you flip it over you’ll notice that tucked inside is a laminated card with some valuable URLs printed on it. On one side, all the links you need to know to reach tech support, and on the other side, links to the social network channels into VMware Support (YouTube, Blogs, Twitter, etc.)

Today we have a post about potential database issues from Matt Scott, who is a tech support engineer in our Broomfield, Colorado office, currently focusing on content creation. This post deals with SQL database operations and so it is recommended you be familiar with database concepts and have adequate backups before proceeding.

In larger VirtualCenter installations you might notice the VPX_EVENT_ARG and VPX_EVENT tables can become very large. For example, in one test environment I created with two hosts I saw over 10,000 rows in the VPX_EVENT Table alone.

In SQL 2008 it is not always easy to find the information for certain tables. If you open the tables in your VirtualCenter database and Right Click > Select Top 100 Rows it returns exactly 1000 rows. A more accurate way to see the advanced properties is go down to the bottom of that list and select properties for the table. In the Storage Page you will see the exact number of rows.

Back to the question at hand: why do these tables get so large?

In many cases it is simply because of the volume hosts and Virtual machines in an environment. But in some cases we see a custom script or third party management software installed on the service console aka VCenter. Some examples of these are:

Run the following command in SQL Server Management Studio to find out exactly what is going on in your database.

SQL Server Management Studio > Login > SQL or Windows Authentication based on your setup > New Query > Change the database to your VCenter Database (We see in many cases including myself from time to time it defaults to the (master) database.

This lists all of the Tables in the Database utilized by VCenter.You can now clean the event tables.use vcdb (Or the name of your VCenter Databases) truncate table vpx_event_arg; delete from vpx_event;Note: As always its good practice to run these during a Maintenance window or when VirtualCenter Services can be brought down.

And of course it is Production Data so a good backup is recommended as stated earlier.

There are foreign keys inside VPX_EVENT, so you cannot truncate the data inside with the standard command:

"truncate table dbo.vpx_event" – It will throw an error similar to the following: Msg 4712, Level 16, State 1, Line 1

Cannot truncate table ‘dbo.VPX_EVENT’ because it is being referenced by a FOREIGN KEY constraint.

In many cases I have seen large ‘dbo.VPX_EVENT’ and ‘dbo.VPX_EVENT_ARG’ tables cause the VCenter service to fail and/or not start. That is why this cleanup procedure is useful in addition to turning off the third party services.

One final note. The previous DELETE command will dynamically save a copy of the change real-time, so you may notice an increase in transaction log growth relative to the amount of data you have at the current time until the cleanup finishes.

Here are three videos that explain what you need to know about VMware Technical Support. The first video demonstrates filing a support request online with VMware and provides a brief description of the support offerings provided by VMware and what you can expect from a Technical Support representative.

How to file a support request online with VMware

Our second support video has Angela Jaques talking all about Global Support Services at VMware, where Angela is a Director. Angela talks about all of the various pieces that make up our support organization, and provides some details on how we rank case severities. She then outlines some really cool new things support is doing, like Twitter and Alerts.

VMware Global Support Services

Lastly, a video containing information about our Technical Support locations and model, as well as how to request an escalation and what to expect during a support escalation. We hope you never have to escalate a case with us, but if you do, it’s good to know how the whole process works.

The team here at VMware have only been producing videos to augment the official Knowledge Base since August, ’09 but the acceptance and feedback from customers has been impressive. We find the model of ‘show me’ really works well for how-to content, or for teaching newcomers who are not sure where everything is in the product, not to mention those customers for which English is not their first language.

Today we thought we’d post a list of the top ten viewed videos for the past quarter. Anything look interesting to you?

During the VMworld conference in San Francisco last week we went live with 60 KB articles and 12 videos to coincide with the vCloud Director announcement. Some of you have already shown your appreciation for content so soon after general availability.

As customers and TSEs become more familiar with vCloud Director, we will be creating and publishing even more content. In the meantime, this first batch is designed to help you get started with the product.

This launch was a truly a coordinated effort that was made possible by the hard work of many individuals. Thanks go to Arunkumar Pandey and Anand Prakash, who worked diligently to create the bulk of the articles, and to Ganesh Shetty, who made sure that licensing information for vCloud Director and Per Virtual Machine licensing was available.

We’ve never gone GA before with this many videos, and thanks for that go to Graham Daly, who coordinated the effort, and to Feidhlim O’Leary, who assisted him.